The People’s Own Landscape

Over its short history, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) racked up a horrific environmental record. Factory emissions produced acid rain, accelerating ‘forest death’ across central Europe. Industrialized collective farms (LPGs) dumped fertilizers into East Germany’s waterways, contaminating over 80% of them. And as the trees and lakes of the GDR declined, so too did the health of East Germans. Based on this record alone, it would appear that the GDR regime rarely, if ever, thought about the environment, let alone protecting it. It is no wonder that historians have looked primarily ‘outside’ the SED regime for answers about East German attitudes towards nature. After all, it was an emergent civil society of the 1980s that famously wielded environmentalism against the faltering state in 1989. Yet as Scott Moranda argues in The People’s Own Landscape , the focus on environmental activism is entirely too narrow, as it encapsulated only a relatively small segment of East German society and environmental thought.

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